The second submission period for Frozen Wavelets closed on 16 December. It had started on 2 December –so, roughly two weeks. We have just finished dealing with the shortlisted pieces, sending out the last acceptances, so it seems a good moment to play the statistics game and see what came over on this occasion.
First of all, the modality of handling submission was different: we have used Moksha in this instance, and I must say the experience was quite satisfactory, well worth the investment. So, Moksha is going to stay.
Number of submissions: 419
Fiction: 254 Poetry: 165
Therefore, the overall number is roughly the same of July (417) but this time we had more poetry and less flash fiction. Looking at the category fiction, the majority was original, with only 46 reprints. The acceptance rate was less than in the previous submission period, due to the fact that this time many pieces were literary fiction instead of speculative. Again, a case of not reading the guidelines.
Talking about this, I must say that for this call ignoring the guidelines has been rather blatant in a few cases. We had people sending us: twelve (yes, 12) poems in one go; epic poetry of several pages; prose-poetry too long even for a flash fiction piece; an entire PDF (!) of their book. I have genuine issues understanding why writers should waste their time (and mine) sending over work that have literally no chance in heaven to be accepted.
A different story is when people sent over pieces not anonymised as requested. Now, I have generally allowed them so far, because I am the first reader and therefore I know the names anyway. But if those pieces are selected to go to the second readers for the voting round I’ll have to anonymise them, and this translates into additional time for me. In future, I might not have this extra-time required for it. So, friendly advice: try to avoid putting your names on your work and save me time that I can put to better use.
Here the final acceptance stats for this call. Fiction: 6.7% Poetry: 6%. Lower than the first time, but it was to be expected since issue #2 (out at the end of this month) is already full.
Was next? I’ll send out the contracts by the end of February, as soon as I finish working on issue #2. In the meantime, you can download issue #1 in either .epub or .pdf from the magazine website and enjoy the artwork to the single pieces.
Yes… having been a judge for a couple of writing competitions, I’m always gobsmacked at the number of folks who simply DON’T read the submission guidelines. Why not????
Yes, that’s a very good question đŸ˜€